


Never Dead But Ever Dying

by Sister of Silence (EmpressofMankind)



Category: Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 15:15:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11557875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmpressofMankind/pseuds/Sister%20of%20Silence
Summary: When I inquired on the topic Josh said he’ll be skipping over this particular scene due to restructuring of Clonelord’s plot device, but gave me his blessing to write it in his stead. So, I did the thing!





	Never Dead But Ever Dying

“Help me up. I must take the last sample.”

It was an odd thing to say in a moment such as this. Odd for any regular person, certainly, but odd even for him. Igori had thought he’d have reminded her of all the things she had to do: all the steps to be taken, all the codes to be remembered. But when it came to it, he didn’t.

He had taught her many things over the past couple of years. The basics at first: how to handle equipment, how to work aseptically and autoclave substrate solutions. The same set of fundamental actions until she could do them while answering his theory questions without missing a beat. It was dull, but she knew it was a great boon the Benefactor wished to teach her. He taught no one else these days.

Once she had mastered the basic methods and theory to his satisfaction, they had moved on to simple procedures and after that increasingly more advanced ones. She had made her first incision, taken her first sample and cultured it. The wound had started to fester, but that didn’t matter for she wasn’t training to be a Medicae after all. The sample had flourished in her meticulously calculated growth medium, as intended. She liked to think he’d been proud, despite the pain the wound caused him. He’d said she’d done well. Even now her chest swelled with pride when she recalled it.

The laboratory was quiet, safe for the soft gurgle of equipment and the thinny melody coming from the old record player. Jaunty yet oddly haunting, she knew it’s classical tune by heart even though she’d never learned its name. Igori pipetted the supernatant out of the small vial with care, avoiding the pellet of cellular debris at the bottom with practiced ease. She deposited the clear liquid in the open petri dish and spread it with a sterilized spatula. She reached across the ventilated work bench with both hands to pick up the bottle of serum standing near the back wall. She pressed and unscrewed the heavy duty cap, took a generous amount of the yellow liquid with a clean pipette and added it to the petri dish. She put the lid on the petri dish as she grabbed a marker and wrote ’#8 - O.K.’ on it before lining it up next to ’#7 - A.Z.’

“You forgot something,” Chief Apothecary Fabius Bile rasped, his hands clasped behind his back as he leaned over the gene-hanced woman’s shoulder to observe her handiwork.

Igori’s eyes went wide with surprise, as she had not noticed his presence before. She looked at her work. She had sterilized the spatula. She’d used clean pipettes. She had added the necessary growth factors. What had she forgotten?

The chirurgeon whirred, extending a limb with a small pincher attached, and tapped the serum bottle’s cap. The bottle itself was standing open and outside the sterile air zone of the antique burner. Igori immediately reached for the cap and put it back on the bottle, twisting it closed.

“It’s contaminated, now,” Bile frowned. Though at her alarmed expression his scowl softened. “No matter, it isn’t progenoid lymph,” he added as he took the bottle from her.

“I’m sorry, Benefactor,” she said.

“Never be sorry, Igori,” he replied as he held up the bottle against the light of the electroscones overhead. “Many great inventions have their origin in mistakes.”

She smiled at that. “Yes, Benefactor.”

He looked at her from the corner of his eyes. “We’ll see what happens. Perhaps something of interest grows in there now.”

His hand twitched and the heavy bottle slipped from his grasp. Igori saw it fall as the tall Apothecary swayed, righting himself in an attempt to maintain his balance. He felt light-headed and his vision whited out.

“Benefactor?” Igori inquired, her tone low but alarmed as she reached out to steady him.

He grasped her shoulder as he blinked the white away. His breath came shallow and rapid. He knew what that meant. “Igori.” She had to start the procedure immediately. Bury his research here. Make way to the nearest facility. He sagged against her as he struggled to organize his thoughts, to form them into words. He scarcely noticed his legs buckling underneath him.

“Benefactor!” Igori was strong, but she couldn’t hold the ancient Astartes upright when he fell, merely slow his descent to the linoleum floor. The chirurgeon dislodged itself so he could lay down. Or perhaps to avoid being crushed beneath his falling bulk. Igori was already on her knees amid the shattered glass and serum, an arm slung around his broad shoulders in an attempt to hold him up.

“Igori-,” he wheezed. He moved his arms back as if to prop himself up on his elbows, but couldn’t. They wouldn’t support his weight. His thoughts wandered, oddly unfocused. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

The chirurgeon scurried around them, its many limbs clicking erratically as if distressed.

“Benefactor?” Igori asked, trying to catch his gaze. Something was terribly wrong. “Benefactor!” she repeated, louder. He didn’t respond. His gaze wandered. It was as if he were reading a manuscript from the cracked ceiling, his eyes moving and his thin lips shaping words without sound.

The chirurgeon squirmed a limb under her arm and stabbed a needle into his thigh, injecting a cloudy white fluid Igori hadn’t seen before. Bile’s gaze focused and snapped away from the ceiling, alert once more. He frowned, evidently confused to find himself sprawled on the floor. He sat up and Igori smiled, but then his expression crumpled in pain. He groaned as he reached for his chest, curling forward. His breath came in a succession of erratic bursts, then faltered all together. He looked surprised as he sagged back down onto the floor.

“Igori?” His voice was barely above a whisper, his gaze fixed on a crack in the ceiling. His hand found her arm.

“Yes, Benefactor?” she leaned towards him, worry edging into her voice. The chirurgeon climbed half over her in turn to inject a needle into his neck, emptying another concoction.

He blinked slowly. “Help me up,” he stated. His hand squeezed her arm weakly. “I must take the last sample.” He made as if to move, but strength failed him, weighed down by his own armor.

“I will do it, Benefactor,” she reassured him. “I will do it right away.” As she said it his eyes found hers, saw her lips shape her promise before they saw nothing more.

Igori clenched her teeth when his gaze fixed and shifted through her. She sniffed and rubbed her sleeve past her eyes. She gently laid his shoulders down. His head lolled to the side as she did so. She rose and strode to his desk and the neat line of sample vials on it. Only one remained empty.

The incubation machine was intricate and delicate, but Igori knew what to do. Though she’d never used this particular device before, she’d seen the Benefactor work with it many times. She manipulated it’s dials, recalling the movement of his hands across the panels rather than the key sequence exactly. Her memory was all but eidetic, her recollection precise and accurate. The ancient device responded to her commands with a soft hiss and whir of ancient servos. She lit the brass gas burner underneath it and picked up the last glass vial. It had already been marked. She held it under the dispenser tube near the flame and reached for the activation lever. Her fingertips brushed past it: it was just out of reach. The New Men were large, approaching the size and stature of Astartes, but not quite.

A spindly servo-limb clicked into her field of view and pulled the lever. “Thanks, Clickie,” she said as she glanced at the chirurgeon before returning her attention to the incubation machine as it started dripping progenoid lymph in the vial. It was a synthesized variant, amplified from a sample of a World Eater’s chest progenoid. The Benefactor always said they had the most stable geneseed this side of the Heresy divide. Them and Iron Warriors, but those were a lot harder to come by.

The Chirurgeon clambered off the bench as Igori collected the sample. It skittered across the floor, its spindly appendages making it seem like a grotesque, mechanical spider. It bend over the dead Apothecary, servos whirring and limbs twitching. In a flash one of them struck, a thick biopsy needle disappearing two inches into the Astartes’ neck. It retrieved it just as quickly, deposited the tissue sample in a small cannister and sequestered it into its metal body.

Igori twisted the cap onto the sample and put it back in the mesh wire holder with the others. Bile’s journal laid beside it, covered in diagrams and schematics concerning the experiments he had been conducting. At the very bottom of the page was a nearly legible table that appeared to be labeled in the same fashion as the vials. Igori took the pen clipped onto the edge and noted down the time and volume with neat, deliberate letters as she manipulated the over-sized writing utensil as best she could. Her eyes teared up despite herself. She rubbed her sleeve past her face, but it was too late. A drop escaped and splattered on the parchment, blotting a series of crowfeet into a pool of black.

“Hah! Guess we can finally turn that shit noise off,” Covix chortled as he swaggered into the laboratory. He swiped his hand over the old record player as he passed it, knocking the pin off the sound plate. The music screeched to a halt.

Anger exploded red hot in front of Igori’s eyes. She turned and drew her foot-long combat knife in one fluid motion. Two leaps carried her to her second. A snarl unfurled on his crude features when he registered her attack. It froze an instant later as she plunged the blade into his bowls, twisted and ripped it upwards with both hands, eviscerating the burly genehound from groin to chin. His mouth opened, but only blood and gurgles came gushing out. He went limp moments later, held up only by the blade embedded in the underside of his skull. Igori glared at his fixed, dead gaze.

She pulled her blade free and strode to the sink to rinse it and wash her hands. After a brief inspection she put it back into its scabbard and returned to the old record player. She lifted the wooden arm with care. It didn’t appear damaged. The pin, at least, was still straight. The Benefactor had told her the old technology to make it was long lost and that even this device was far older than it seemed. He’d said it had already been so when it had come into his possession, decades before he’d become an Apothecary. He’d bought it from a stranger from Ythill, who had had many such strange instruments of glass and metal. Fortunately, the waxplate hadn’t been scratched. The Benefactor wouldn’t have liked that when he came back. She put the pin onto the waxplate and immediately it resumed its jaunty, haunting tone. She smiled as she picked up a square-foot organ cannister and returned to the Apothecary’s side.

The chirurgeon scurried up beside her as she knelt and lifted his shoulders and head into her lap. She pushed up her sleeves and cleaned her hands and lower arms with a generous amount of disinfectant while the chirurgeon sterilized a long and narrow blade with its internal burner. “Thank you, Clickie,” she remarked without looking up as she measured the distance from Bile’s laryngeal prominence down along his throat to a point well below his progenoid gland by spacing her fingertips just so.

She took the knife the chirurgeon proffered and aligned it’s tip with care. Before slamming it down with all her considerable strength, forcing it between the fortified vertebrae with an audible crack. Beside her, cold steam wafted from the cannister as the chirurgeon opened it. Blood and genefluid gushed out the wound, but she paid it no heed and hummed the old record player’s melody as she cut all the way through.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of time and hard work went into the creation and publication of this story and as such it is very dear to me. I would love to hear what you thought of it! If you decide to share my story, please credit and link back to me. Thank you!


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